Word: reza
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...royal duties, the Shah gave the boy five years of European schooling. The Shah had learned to read & write Persian only after becoming Minister of War; the Crown Prince became proficient in French, English and European manners in one of the most expensive private schools in Switzerland. But Mohamed Reza was not allowed to finish. The Shah, suddenly bitten with suspicion that his son was wasting his time, ordered him home for a more rigorous personal preparation in the duties of kingship...
...Kingdom. In 1941, when Germany's attack made aid to Russia through Iran an essential of Allied victory, the Allies took a long, hard look at old Reza Shah Pahlevi. They suspected some of his hangers-on of intrigue with Germany and, in any case, Reza Shah was too strong a character to be left athwart the Lend-Lease supply line to the U.S.S.R. So he was deposed, last year in far away Johannesburg died, full of bitter memories. Mohamed Reza, the wavy-haired young playboy, ascended the jeweled Peacock Throne of Iran...
Since the days of Darius and Cyrus, the kingdom had descended far. It was still large (a fifth as big as the U.S.) and its mountains and desert contrasts were still dramatically scenic. But of Mohamed Reza's 15 million subjects a few thousand lived in lavish luxury, and almost all the rest in ragged poverty. At least eleven million of them had venereal disease. Most of the adults were opium addicts. Four out of every five children born died in infancy. Three out of every four who survived never learned to read or write...
...Fawzia, Too. The old Shah saw to it that Mohamed Reza on his return to Teheran had a plentiful supply of mistresses. When the time came for the Crown Prince to marry, nothing was too good for him. His bride was Fawzia, 17-year-old sister of Egypt's King Farouk, as beautiful a princess as a prince could wish. They had only one child, a daughter called Shahnaz ("the pet of the Shah"), born in October 1940. Thereafter, it became apparent that the Shah's tastes were quantitative rather than qualitative Fawzia, whose family with a century...
King in Crisis. Preoccupied by these personal problems and pleasures, the Shah, Mohamed Reza, was scarcely the man to steer his country through a crisis. His Majlis (Parliament) of feudal landlords was not much help. Many of the abler members were instruments either of Britain or Russia, both of which continued to encourage the corruption of Iranian life. Both, too, disrupted Iran's economic life throughout the war. The British (with the Americans) monopolized the country's inadequate transportation system for Lend-Lease shipments to Russia; the Russians prevented shipment of grain from food-rich Azerbaijan to Teheran...